Fighting to Lose (44 page)

It worked like a charm. Although Ritter understandably did not reveal it when in British custody after the war, the ineptitude of MI5 enabled him to run Owens as a passive and then active triple agent from October 1939 onward. This came about because MI5 had begun the Second World War with little counter-espionage experience relevant to spying by a sophisticated foreign power. This is proved by MI5’s evident ignorance of the state of the art as it was to be found in the published spy memoirs of the day. It was also wilfully blind to advances in technology, especially those to do with wireless communications. It was a deficit that could not be made up by relying on the Radio Security Service, itself a largely amateur operation.

The result was, Ritter found himself parrying a British double-agent operation that at first seemed too clumsy to be serious. But it was, and he soon was garnering much useful intelligence by sending Owens back to England with lengthy questionnaires to which the British would have to supply at least some true answers. It was a ploy born of the First World War, when the Germans noticed that the British were prone to giving their spies extensive “inquiry sheets” covering military and economic topics and, in particular, details on the effect of their air raids.4

By mid-1940, when it was clear his counter-espionage adversary had little grasp of clandestine wireless operations, Ritter found he could plant double agents on MI5 by allowing the British to intercept wireless messages in easy-to-break ciphers that referred to his spies before they set out for England.

The so-called
Lena
spies, and later TRICYCLE, were all of this type. Consider the following: Only in September did Ritter finally send agents to Britain equipped with wireless sets, ostensibly to hide out until the Germans invaded and then radio back British troop movements. They were a little late for that:

Canaris, then at Hitler’s elbow and aware that the RAF was undefeated, clearly knew the invasion was to be called off even before Caroli was dispatched. This is further evidence, along with the clumsily forged identity papers, that Caroli and the others who followed him were meant to be caught.

A security organization so easily fooled was bound to be victim of multiple penetrations by the enemy, and up to mid-1941, while Hitler and Stalin were still on friendly terms, German and Soviet agents were equally to be feared. Apart from Owens, another for the Germans is definitely known: William Rolph, the source of the super-secret list of right-wingers found on Owens after McCarthy blew the whistle on him. Two for the Soviets were Anthony Blunt, exposed after the war as a member of the notorious Cambridge Five, and Guy Liddell, the B Division chief, who was a Soviet agent-of-influence at the least.

Indeed, the evidence against Liddell is huge. In addition to opening the doors for Burgess, Blunt, and Philby to enter MI5 and MI6, and the access he gave Blunt to his office documents, it is surely not an innocent coincidence that MI5 totally failed to detect Soviet recruitment of young intellectuals at Oxford and Cambridge during the 1930s. As Liddell was then deputy-director of the counter-subversion section, this would have fallen under his mandate. So the failure was largely his. The ultimate fault, however, must lie with whomever in government sanctioned the transfer of Scotland Yard’s anti-communist section to MI5 in 1931 after two of its Special Branch investigators were discovered to be working for the Soviets. Liddell was included in that transfer. Basic prudence should have dictated that there might have been a yet undetected third guilty party.6

Yet another German agent appears to have been at large. In the second month of the war, when Canaris was conspiring with generals Halder and Beck to overthrow Hitler, Arthur Owens returned from meeting DR. RANTZAU with the warning that the Germans had a spy in the Air Ministry. If this was not something he made up, then it was a direct tipoff from the Abwehr, and if a vast amount of circumstantial evidence counts for anything, Air Commodore Boyle fits the bill. He had been the primary source of intelligence for MI5’s double agents both before and after becoming director of Air Intelligence, and by late 1940 was said (by Masterman, at least) to be supplying much of the content of the wireless messages being sent by SNOW, SUMMER, and TATE. Anyone in Hamburg or Berlin then, and anyone now, casually looking at the agent wireless reports being received by Hamburg from A-3504, A-3719, and A-3725. and sent on to Berlin during 1940–41 would conclude that the helpful Commodore Boyle was a spy
par excellence
.

This theory works well if the Germans knew Owens was being supplied with mostly true information, which he apparently was. It also requires either complicity or a considerable lack of intellectual vigour on Robertson’s part. Most of the messages prepared for sending to the Germans by wireless that he oversaw, or possibly composed himself, are missing from today’s MI5 archives, maybe because they would make Boyle look as guilty as sin.

The German side of the messages are available, however, and if they are examined closely, an alternative picture emerges. The preliminary logic is this: Either the information Boyle approved for sending was good and helped the Germans overall, making him a traitor; or the information was good but did not help the Germans overall, making him a clever counter-intelligence operative. The former is not impossible, but the latter is certainly more likely, since he was a senior civil servant with a long pre-war attachment to the Air Ministry and to its intelligence branch. He also had been runner-up to Stewart Menzies as chief of MI6 when Admiral Sinclair died. He was known and trusted in the highest circles of the governing Establishment.7

Considered in this light, Boyle permitting the sending over of current weather information during the Battle of Britain may not have been such a bad move. Allowing that the Luftwaffe would use it to help schedule its raids, Fighter Command could roughly calculate when it could afford to stand down its exhausted fighter pilots for an extra hour or two. The Battle of Britain was that closely fought that a little extra pilot rest could have made a difference.

This theory puts a different slant on some of the other information Boyle released. Did it really matter if the Germans knew the RAF’s order of battle, or were told the location of factories that were identified on the pre-war British topographical maps that the Germans already possessed?8 Was the availability of these maps deception in the first place, conceived and prepared before the war with the intention of moving production elsewhere once it had started?

The information on the RAF airplane repair facilities at St. Athans and elsewhere, which Robertson attributed to Boyle, does not seem so valuable when compared to the Chain Home radar stations or the camouflaged war-production factories, especially as the hangars could be cleared if attacks were expected. Was exaggerating bomb damage to British industry better than minimizing it? Would this deter repeat attacks? Would German pilots get discouraged if they understood their bombing had cut British aircraft production in half yet the Spitfires and Hurricanes kept coming?

If it was Boyle who was behind the messages on the searchlight locations in London, were they falsified in order to throw German bombers off target when night bombing started? Churchill appears to have been at play here. Ladislas Farago, in
The Game of Foxes
— from which his source notes are missing — mentions that during the Blitz the prime minister took a direct hand in choosing what intelligence to feed the Germans, presumably through Boyle and Robertson. Farago wrote:

Mr. Churchill’s somewhat fiendish scheme was to direct the Luftwaffe from strategic areas by giving them bogus intelligence that built up expendable areas as desirable targets. He could be quite callous in selecting the latter. They included certain residential districts. This led to a violent clash between the Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison, the Cockney statesman, in a heated Cabinet meeting. The Home Secretary, a leader of the Labour party, protested bitterly and vehemently against Churchill’s choice of targets, exclaiming: “Who are we to play God?”9

There is no reason to disbelieve this anecdote, and it explains why three months into the Blitz it was Boyle who proposed creating the Wireless Board. It capped authority to release target information to MI5’s wireless double agents at the directors of intelligence level, and would have enabled Boyle to deal with Captain Robertson without the War Cabinet, the chiefs of staff, the Home Office, or even his own fellow directors of intelligence knowing. The rule that no one was to keep written records would also spare Churchill the inevitable public opprobrium should it be found out — even long after the war — that he had a hand in determining what neighbourhoods, and beyond London, what cities would be bombed.

This may well be one of Britain’s outstanding wartime secrets. Most people would not understand anyone wanting the power to decide who gets struck by lightning, but being able to give some direction to German bombers gave Churchill limited ability to save the great monuments of London like St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Parliament at Westminster, Tower Bridge, and Buckingham Palace. Their loss would have been a devastating blow to public morale. These were the truly “strategic” targets that, in Churchill’s eyes, at least, might have decided the war.

On June 20, 1940, three months before the bombing of England started, the House of Commons sat in secret session to hear from Churchill what he thought was in store for Britain when France surrendered, and what could be expected in the days to come. No record of the debate was kept, but the prime minister’s notes for his speech survive:

… steady continuous bombing probably rising to great intensity occasionally … our bombing incomparably superior, more precise … enemy has great preponderance numbers but their industry is much more concentrated. Utmost importance to preserve morale of people…. This supreme battle depends on the courage of the ordinary man and woman…. All depends on the Battle of Britain.10

Churchill had reason to expect German bombers to start attacking British cities. A month earlier, with German panzers bursting out of the Ardennes and the French government in a panic, he had ordered night bombing of the Ruhr. In a note to the French, he explained: “I have examined today with the War Cabinet and all the experts the request which you made to me last night and this morning for further fighter squadrons. We are all agreed that it is better to draw the enemy onto this island by striking at his vitals, and thus aid the common cause.”11

Over the following weeks, RAF bombers attacked at least ten German cities with high explosive and incendiaries, always at night, and with little hope of actually hitting industrial or war-related targets. Fires were started, houses destroyed, and civilians killed. The aim, according to Churchill’s note, was to provoke retaliation, and it is in this context that Arthur Owens’s mid-June trip to Lisbon can be viewed. It would explain why Captain Robertson allowed him to go, even though he had been caught red-handed with the William Rolph material. It explains why references to this trip, which are contained in German sources, have been scrubbed from the MI5 records. The reports of E-186 that Owens brought to Major Ritter were intended to tempt Hitler into bombing Britain.

If the E-186 reports dealing with the locations of Bomber and Fighter Command are seen in this way, as bait, it is evident they were chosen judiciously. They were not the real nerve centres of Britain’s air defences. This was RAF Uxbridge, the Operations Control Centre for No. 11 Fighter Group covering London and the Southeast. Bomber Command headquarters at High Wycombe could be lost; and so could Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, for these served basically planning and administrative purposes. To cripple Uxbridge, even for a day or two, when the war in the air was hot could be disastrous.12

This had to be coming from the prime minister. Only he could make the decision to invite German bombers onto so apparently choice a target as Stanmore, probably without mentioning it to Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, who stood to be killed. Fortunately for him, Stanmore and High Wycombe were barely touched by the Luftwaffe during the entire war, and then only by accident. Most important of all, Uxbridge was spared, making the whole episode a serendipitous triumph.13

As it so happened, Hitler continued to keep the Luftwaffe on a leash that only reached the docks of Britain’s southern ports, hoping instead that with the defeat of France the British would see the uselessness of continuing the fight and come to terms — terms that he was prepared to make generous. Churchill chose to fight on, and in mid-August concentrated attacks on RAF airfields, radar sites, and airplane factories began. When that battle was at its height, with the RAF near the breaking point, Churchill ordered the night-bombing of Berlin. This time Hitler retaliated. On September 15, a mass raid struck London. The RAF was given the vital breather; the ordeal of Britain’s cities had begun.